Quotes About Creativity

I think if I was interested in writing on my own, I would be a novelist - then you could write about yourself, and that would be it. You wouldn't need anyone else.

My whole life, I've wanted to be a novelist.

It's very lucky when you have an artist - whether it's a novelist or a filmmaker or a singer - whose career you can follow from the beginning and feel that you are in some way part of it, or part of the same world that it comes out of.

I'm not a writer; I'm not a novelist.

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

I have always loved short stories. I have been at least as influenced by the short story masters as I have been by novelists.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

It seemed to me you could do anything in comics. So I started doing my thing, which is mainly influenced by novelists, stand-up comedians, that sort of thing.

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will live in several places at once. That is both our curse and our charm.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

The novel is just fine: It's novelists who aren't doing so well.

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.

God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists should be free to write whatever they want, to let their imaginations roam as close to or as removed from reality as they see fit.

I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing.

Novelists seem to fall into two distinct categories - those that plan and those that just see where it takes them. I am very much the former category.

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.

Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.

It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music.

Actors love to do extreme things, so that is why they become actors; otherwise, they'd be novelists.